Perhaps you have never wondered what Australians talk about after dinner; or perchance you are Australian and already know that we sometimes like to have a bit of snake chit chat. Having finished our barbecue lunch, we were relaxing and chatting around the table; I don’t know who started the conversation but we were discussing our favoured subject of snakes. Incidentally, the we who comprised the small gathering on this occasion were my brothers, Bill and Henry, Henry’s girlfriend, Diane, and my old boyfriend, now just  good friend, Roland – my niece, Loretta, had left early to go on to another party..

“I’ve seen two snakes since I’ve been back,” I announced proudly (well, I was still alive).

Everybody looked suitably horrified and nodded to each other as if to say “She’s still alive though – well done to Sally!” Few people really like snakes, and certainly not in our family – not after a childhood in Gumdale.

“I used to have a recurring nightmare about snakes when we lived at Gumdale,” Bill said, “In my nightmare I was always backed up into a corner looking out – I thought it was safer to look outwards to see them coming for me – but they drilled through the walls behind me to get at me.”

Bill winced and we all winced with him, in sympathy.

“I had nightmares about snakes every night of my life until the age of ten when we moved to Wynnum,” I joined in, wincing, “Sometimes I lived in a tree-house in the jungle, like Tarzan, where I was safe but whenever I walked on the jungle floor bags of snakes would open up in front of me…”

“Why were you all so traumatised by snakes?” asked Diane, “I, too, grew up with snakes but I never had nightmares. Although my uncle nearly had a heart attack when he thought there was one in the thunder-box once, but it was just a bit of paper that had fallen against his back.”

Bill, Henry and I glanced at one another knowingly. Bill was about to answer when I beat him to it.

“Well, let me tell you about the time Mum was in the old sentry box toilet and there was a black snake coiled around the inside of the door knob…” I began excitedly.

“That was me in the toilet with the snake coiled around the door knob, not Mum,” Bill interjected, “And how do you think I managed to get out?”

He paused to heighten the suspense before telling us.

“I had to climb up and crawl out of a gap under the pitch of the roof.”

“And, you won’t remember, Henry, because you were younger, but Mum got Mr. Conelly to come over with his gun to shoot it,” I added (and Henry nodded vigorously to confirm his memory was as good as mine).

“No, it was Mr. Pigooli (not sure of the spelling but that’s how I always heard it – think he was Polish!),” Bill corrected me, “and…”

“Mr. Pigooli shot it then,” I asserted.

“No, you wouldn’t believe what he did – he grabbed a piece of fibro and threw it at the snake!”

“Did it kill it?” I asked stupidly (because fibro isn’t very heavy and it would have taken years for the snake to develop asbestosis).

“Of course not, and the worst of it was that the snake got away and went under the toilet box – I never wanted to go in the toilet again!”

Everybody laughed, even Roland, (who didn’t have any snake stories from his soft, English childhood), because we all knew that nobody ever really wanted to go in those nasty, smelly old thunder-box toilets.